To say that Kathy Ryan knows her subject inside out is an understatement. She shot every image in this exhibition inside the New York Times building – the workplace she loves. But the visual subjects that matter to her are not restricted to architect Renzo Piano’s landmark structure (built 2000-2007); although nowadays her more appropriate title is director of photography, Ryan has been chief picture editor of The New York Times Magazine since 1987.

Office Romance, 10:32 a.m. September 17, 2015

Office Romance, 9:54 a.m. November 20, 2015

Office Romance, 9:59 a.m. August 11, 2013

Ryan is one of the few who commission and select photography for prominent editorial publications who have become legendary. Echoes of legendary photographers’ work – Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Berenice Abbot, Erwin Blumenfeld – are evident in hers, and serve as evidence of the gamut of her visual knowledge. Here the atmosphere pays homage to painter Edward Hopper, there the minimal treatment is reminiscent of some of Frank Stella’s stripe work. However there is nothing nostalgic in her pictures, which were first published on her Instagram feed (kathyryan1 with 96K followers); she has a great talent for commissioning new and interesting contemporary photography, often from unexpected sources, in particular from artist photographers such as Taryn Simon and Thomas Struth, among many others. Kathy Ryan’s own pioneering spirit is reflected in these intimate images from her everyday world.

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The gritty and graphic black and white photography that Robert Capa(b Budapest 1913, d Indochina 1954) is famous for – the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War – tell the dramatic and poignant story of armed conflict and political strife in uncompromising terms by a fearless photographer who made no bones about being right there amongst the action. To equal effect, Capa applied the same treatment to documenting European cities in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Amongst the many posthumous retrospective exhibitions of his work, however, virtually none of the colour images that he produced on another camera, which he used alongside that loaded with black and white film, have ever appeared in print.

Capa began experimenting in colour as early as 1938, using Kodachrome to document the Sino-Japanese War and was disappointed when only four of his colour pictures (the more hard-hitting of which were not available to accompany this post, but some of which can be seen here) that he regarded as lacking nothing in comparison to his monochrome images, were selected for use in Life magazine. Despite his best efforts, none of his 1941 World War II colour photographs ever reached publication. Capa in Color at the Jeu de Paume’s outpost in the Château de Tours – organised in conjunction with the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, which showed the exhibition for the first time this summer – provides Europe with the rare opportunity to see this unseen and revealing body of work.

Well-known for his pursuit of beautiful women, lover of actress Ingrid Bergman, who he met when she was entertaining American soldiers in Europe, in 1945, Capa followed her to Hollywood, where, in an attempt to reinvent himself as a photographer, he worked for American International Pictures for a short time. Suggestive of uncertainty and wandering, the glamorous colour images of his postwar career are devoid of the gravity of his war stories. Having revealed that his great wish was to become an ‘unemployed’ war photographer, but unsure of his role in the more playful and prosperous colourful world that magazines were keen to promulgate, in 1954, Capa accepted a Life magazine assignment in Southeast Asia where French forces had been fighting for eight years. Under fire in a dangerous area, he left his jeep and stepped on a landmine, later dying of his injuries.

Don McCullin (b 1935), who is to present his War and Peace fundraising lecture for the Tusk Trust, in aid of conservation, community development and environmental education programmes across Africa, at Christie’s London in December, has been quoted as saying that he doesn’t like to be termed a war photographer. ‘It’s like saying I work in an abattoir; it’s like being called a criminal,’ he said.

Only a few years after Capa perished, McCullin, having just finished national service in the RAF, took his first published photo of The Guvners, a local Finsbury Park gang posing amongst the remains of a bombed-out house, which appeared in The Observer in 1958. Three years later, having secured a contract with the newspaper, he took his first war photographs for it, covering the Cyprus war. McCullin worked for The Sunday Times Magazine between 1966 and 1984, a period in which he considers he produced his finest work. Most famous for his photos of Vietnam and Cambodia, his Sunday Times assignments took him to Biafra, the Belgian Congo, Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, the Lebanese Civil War, El Salvador, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. In a recent interview published on the Christie’s website he explained, ‘I found wars exciting when I first went to photograph them. I thought this is fun, the bullets are flying – it’s a bit Hollywood. Then I started going to wars where the civilian population was suffering the most, and that brought about a change in me.’

McCullin took huge risks in order to take his photographs. Threatened with a knife at a Muslim checkpoint in Beirut, blinded by CS gas during a riot in Derry, he was wounded by mortar shell fragments in Cambodia. He was most frightened when, having been arrested by Idi Amin’s thugs in Uganda he was taken to a notorious prison where they were murdering hundreds of people every day with sledgehammers. He survived; but admits to being damaged. His relentless bravery undimmed, his urge to go wherever the action is unassuaged – aged 77, he covered the war in Aleppo, Syria, for The Times – sharing a home with his third wife, he now has a firm base in Somerset, where his friend, David Bailey, is a neighbour.

Although his own work is sought after and sells for thousands of pounds via his gallerist, Hamiltons, McCullin deplores the pretentiousness of photographers who call themselves artists. Having dabbled in colour, he remains a master of black and white photography. Now 80 years old, he turned his attention to landscape in the late 1980s. ‘After all, a landscape cannot cry or bleed,’ he has said. In 2010 he went in search of the Roman ruins spread across the Middle East and North Africa, photographing them for his book, Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across The Roman Empire. His newer images include British landscapes, notably of Somerset. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, in Bruton, is currently hosting the exhibition Don McCullin: Conflict – People – Landscape.

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Like many of my peers during the latter years of the 1960s, in my teens I collected American comics. And I suppose because he was supposed to be a teenager too, DC Comics‘ Superboy was a particular favourite. Naturally I also liked Superman, Batman, and The Flash. I admired the Marvel Comics’ superhero Daredevil, who, even though he had been blinded by radiation – in the process gaining super powers – managed to look great and perform amazing feats. The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Spiderman and Thor were more Marvel favourites, and I used to scare myself half to death with DC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.

They had no connection to DC Comics, but I had grown up with DC Thomson & Co Limited’s children’s weeklies, The Beano, Topper and The Dandy, and later, The Victor and The Hotspur, and when I delivered newspapers, I always looked forward to reading the Oor Wullie strip in the Scottish paper The Sunday Post, before pushing it through one of my regular letterboxes. Oor Wullie means Our Willie. Originally created by DC Thompson editor R D Low in 1936, it was drawn for many years by Dudley D Watkins (1907 > 1969). Our Wullie’s trademarks are spiky hair, dungarees and an upturned bucket, which he often uses as a seat. When our own kids reached the right age, my wife and I regularly bought them Oor Wullie, and The Broons annuals for Christmas, which they – and we – read over and over again, and which their friends were always keen to borrow.

On trips to Paris, we always made a bee-line to FNAC in the rue de Rennes, spending hours leafing through the illustrated books, especially the Barbar stories, begun originally in 1931 by Jean de Brunhoff, who died in 1937, and continued from 1946 by his son Laurent(b 1925). Although they weren’t actually in comic book form, each story was constructed with lots of sequential, situational drawings. It was possible to ‘get’ the story, even without reading the French text – which neither of us could. Our other favourites were The Adventures of Tin Tin, created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name Hergé. I, at least knew these illustrators’ names and work, but there was a huge raft of contemporary illustrated comics and comic books available in the shop, full of the most amazing work, that wasn’t, to my knowledge at the time, to be got anywhere in the UK, except for a single, poky shop called Forbidden Planet, off Tottenham Court Road in central London. There had been others – Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, started in 1969, which had followed another called Weird Fantasy, but Forbidden Planet, founded in 1975, outlived them and today claims to be the world’s biggest chain of comic shops, with massive online sales. Now, as the Japanese manga phenomenon proliferates and the graphic novel becomes ever more popular, Sotheby’s Bande Dessinée / Comic Strip Art sale, tomorrow, is a timely opportunity to sample a broad, international cross section of the genre, via the exhibition, the sale, the online catalogue or the printed version, available via their website.

On leaving university, my first job had been at The Sunday Times – at that point, incidentally, owned by DC Thompson. In my thirties and early forties, as Art Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine – a weekly supplement to the newspaper – I was probably commissioning more illustration than anyone else in magazines (except, perhaps the art editor at The Radio Times) in London. The Sunday Times Magazine didn’t run a cartoon strip, but when I was asked to redesign Watchword the children’s magazine of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation (which The Sunday Times supported) its editor was keen to have one in it. We settled on the idea of a girl and a boy who would make discoveries in the natural world together. I came up with their names: Flora & Fauna which became the strip’s title. I believe it ran for around five years. It was my first and only involvement with the commissioning of comic strip illustration.

All images courtesy Sotheby’s

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Apologies!Due to a combination of wild storms that blew smoke from the wood fire back down the chimney, setting off alarms in every room, and covered everything in a fine layer of soot, and the power cut that, in amongst all of this, plunged our friends’ isolated, converted corn mill where we were staying into deep, velvety darkness, The Blog isn’t posting this week.

In the meantime, you might like to take a look at our reminder of the diverse range of international visual arts and events-related subjects we posted in 2014.

Best wishes for 2015

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We showed a selection of compelling images from Roxanne Lowit Photographs Yves Saint Laurent, a glitzy new book – with an introduction by no less a figure than Pierre Bergé – and wrote about Vitra’s more modest new publication Everything is Connected, which relies totally on visual language rather than written text to relate the company’s labyrinthine story.

We loved Korean artist Lee Bul’s captivating installations at the UK’s Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and the Museum für Gestaltung’s 100 Years of Swiss Design exhibition – as well as the accompanying Lars Müller book – showing selections from the Museum’s consolidated collections, now housed at the Schaudepot in Zürich’s burgeoning New Toni development.

We published extracts from Christie’s International Head of 20th Century Decorative Art & DesignPhilippe Garner’s scintillating interview with Zeev Aram, on the subject of Japanese furniture designer Shiro Kuramata. And we salivated over Serge Mouille’s 1950s sculptural lighting included in Phillips Design sale in New York.

We hope the journey so far has been as interesting for you as it has for us.

As the globe – at least in communication terms – continues to shrink, the cultural landscape forever widens and diversifies. What was formerly remote has often become more easily accessible. In response, 2015 will see The Blogextending its reach and venturing into geographical and subject areas we may have so far ignored, exploring and gaining entry for our followers to a broader range of thought-provoking, disparate and topical events in the omnipresent visual arts and associated artistic disciplines.

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I own a copy of Paris Vogue’s‘Homáge a Paris’ June / July 1985 issue, the cover illustrated with a painting of a bare-shouldered, three-quarter length female model against a minimal evening backdrop of the city, unmistakable because of the small, blurred, floodlit silhouette of the The Arc de Triomphe in the distance, placing her, unmistakably on the sophisticated and romantic Champs-Élysées. Hands, clenched below her chin, she wears long black gloves, with diamond earrings and a diamond necklace. Her black hair is piled high on top of her head. Her black-mascara’d eyes closed in ecstasy, her full red-lipped mouth with even white teeth smiles wide with sheer delight. The perfect picture of Parisian glamour – a huge gold ribbon cinches the waist of her spangled black dress, and, extending off both sides of the cover, binds her image to the magazine. The message is unmistakable. The artist who created it was René Gruau (1909 > 2004).

Gruau, whose heyday was in the 1940s and 50s was one of the main attractions in the enormously successful, Drawing Fashion: 100 years of fashion illustrated exhibition in 2010 at London’s Design Museum. From today, and deservedly so, re-jigged and rearranged to suit the new venue, the same material is getting a fresh outing under the title Drawing Fashion. Masterpieces of a Century at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. The new exhibition celebrates the genre as represented in 165 images, covering the whole of the 20th century period, with a few examples from the 21st, from the unique collection of original artworks of renowned Munich art dealer Joelle Chariau.

Split into seven sections – the first two representing a particular style or epoch – the extravagant art deco of the 1910s and twenties is followed by the more dignified fashions of the thirties and forties. Each subsequent decade is represented by its outstanding illustrators – the fifties by René Gruau (1909 > 2004), the sixties to eighties by the remarkable, prolific and highly-influential New Yorker, and close associate of Karl Lagerfeld, Antonio (Antonio Lopez, 1943 > 1987), who worked in Paris from 1969 to the mid 70s. Then come those who are still working today like, sensitive master of the watercolour wash, the Swede, Mats Gustafson (b 1951), the Swiss, François Berthoud (b 1961), of whom Anna Piaggi– Vogue Italia fashion contributor and style icon – wrote: ‘While François illustrates fashion in an apparently formal and decorative way, in reality he analyses his subject in depth and with an elegant sense of detachment before recreating it in his atelier-laboratory…. with a sharp sense of irony and a visual culture rooted in conceptual art!’ This section also includes Parisian Aurore de La Morinerie (b 1962), who spent two years studying the Chinese calligraphy that was to become a formative influence on her style.

The Fashion Illustration Gallery(Paris) website has examples of work by most, but not all of the big names from the 20th and 21st centuries. Their list is dived into two alphabetically-ordered groups – the younger illustrators, followed by the more mature or no longer living, or so it appears – which puts flavour of the moment, David Downton, whose slick, nostalgic style pays tribute to those who went before him – such as Gruau – right at the top. It’s interesting to see, however, some young people like Daisy De Villeneuve, with her own inimitable, primitive style, pushing the genre in a very personal and alternative direction. Former fashion designer, Richard Haines‘ matter-of-fact, laid-back watercolour sketches come close to caricature. Award-winning, Japanese fashion illustrator Hiroshi Tanabe, who quickly became established after leaving college in 1990, has an assured graphic hand that produces reduced, often minimal images with a whiff of the 1970s about them, which are at the same time bang up to date.

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The Blog is about art, architecture, books, design and gardens, and anything else that currently interests us which we think might interest you.

The publishers of The Blog insist that all images supplied for publication in our posts are cleared for that use before being sent to us. Whether pictures are sent to us as email attachments or made available as downloadable files, any responsibility for fees which may, under any circumstances, fall due, must be borne by the source supplier

Tell us what you thinkThe Blog is about art, architecture, books, design and gardens, and anything else that currently interests us which we think might interest you.

The publishers of The Blog insist that all images supplied for publication in our posts are cleared for that use before being sent to us. Whether pictures are sent to us as email attachments or made available as downloadable files, any responsibility for fees which may, under any circumstances, fall due, must be borne by the source supplier

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‘Day and night I try, in my studio with its six two-thousand watt suns,balancing between the extremes of the impossible, to shake loose the real from
the unreal, to give visions body, to penetrate into unknown transparencies.‘Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969)

With around 100 colour photographs as well as archive material from fashion magazines, this show at Somerset House focuses on the work Erwin Blumenfeld – one of the most influential, innovative and sought-after fashion photographers of the 1940s and 1950s – produced at his studio in New York.

Born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Blumenfeld began taking photographs when he was just ten years old. His first job was as an apprentice dressmaker, but between 1916 and 1933 he produced dadist montages in Germany, where he was closely associated with George Grosz, before moving first to Holland, then to Paris in 1936, where he met Cecil Beaton, who got him an introduction to Vogue. However, as a result of his publishing bitingly mocking collages of Adolf Hitler, Blumenfeld spent the occupation years in a concentration camp, eventually fleeing Europe with his family for the United States in 1941. In New York he worked in the studio of Martin Munkacsi until his own career started to flourish. Taken up by Russian emigré art director Alexey Brodovitch, who was fostering the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture-making at Harper’s Bazaar, Blumenfeld continued to work for Vogue, gaining him a reputation as the highest paid freelance photographer in New York. He went on to produce advertising campaigns for top cosmetics clients such as Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and L’Oreal.

Blumenfeld had a passion for the female form, which he expressed through headily erotic images in which mirrors, gauzy fabrics, screens, wet silk and elaborately contrived shadows and angles were used to enhance or discreetly mask the body. He became a master of complex studio photography and developed sophisticated techniques of solarisation and superimposition that, even today, continue to influence photographers. The renowned fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø recently commented: ‘Blumenfeld was shooting 60 years ago what the rest of us will be shooting in 10 years time’.

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